A new look at a 425-year-old map has yielded a tantalising clue about the fate of the Lost Colony, the settlers who disappeared from Britain's Roanoke Island in the late 16th century. Experts from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum in London discussed their findings Thursday at a scholarly meeting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their focus: the "Virginia Pars" map of Virginia and North Carolina created by explorer John White in the 1580s and owned by the British Museum since 1866. "We believe that this evidence provides conclusive proof that...

Domesticated swine and Western Civilization go back a long way together. The domestic pig was being raised in Europe by about 1500 BC. Rome improved pig breeding and spread them throughout their empire. The early Christians increasingly abandoned the Jewish ban on the eating of pork by about 50 AD and it’s been the celebrated ‘other white meat’ ever since. Pigs and the discovery of the New World went hand in hand. Christopher Columbus took eight pigs on his voyage to Cuba in 1493 at Queen Isabella’s insistence. Hernando de Soto brought America’s first thirteen pigs to Tampa Bay, Fla.,...

Robert Anthony, curator of the North Carolina collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill... was one of the 24 scholars who holed up last month in the Tower of London, the dank quarters where Raleigh spent most of the last 15 years of his life working on Volume I of the "History of the World." When the academics emerged from the Tower after two days, it was agreed that a critical analysis of the writings and works of the man largely responsible for persuading the queen to launch the 1584-87 Roanoke...